Summer Time Fun

  Among other, certainly more meaningful events, Memorial Day seems to mark the beginning of summer for just about everyone regardless of what the calendar says. I am one to stick my tongue out at the band wagon and refuse to climb aboard, but when it comes to observing summer and all the fun that it entails, I can't resist looking at today as summer while yelling, "Full speed ahead!" Today was both restful and hectic including Hunky driving six hours round trip to retrieve children who had been frolicking with grandparents all week. The girls brought home with them all the bustle and enthusiasm, breathless tales and giggly remembrances, dirty laundry and packed suitcases that traveling children are wont to do. It's exciting to have them back home, and that's not just because they leave again for camp in five days.

The beginning of summer always seems to mark a season of newness in my life: a new school quarter; an overhaul in schedules which means more freedom, swimming, late sunsets, deck time, hammock time, growing things and yard work. Life just looks different in summer time, and how it looks gets to be determined in large part by me.

Cheri proved to me that she is still celebrating my birthday month by sending me this inspiring little gifty and it just so happens that it is almost 100 days before our family vacation in September. Coincidence? I think not.

I begin pondering today about a summer bucket list. I love to do this, even though I never have finished one. I'm learning the joy really is in the journey, and the journey of a bucket list has always proven itself worthwhile. I decided also to resurrect the list blog and put the Summer 2011 Bucket list there. It is a work in progress but I hope to complete it by the end of the week.

Last but not least, I plan to continue (or reboot) the running and exercising. I've been slothful since my birthday. It's time to get back to being disciplined. By this time next year I plan to be able to say that I am satisfied with my health, weight and fitness. Today I am very pleased with the results of a year of hard work, but not yet where I want to be. I can be more, and I intend to.

The Last Day

 I have to admit, when it comes to my Hunky, I'm selfish.  He's smart and funny and a good kisser and not too hard on the old eyes, either. The whole package really. Technically we've had all week alone together. I say technically because it seems as though exactly one billion other things have competed for his attention this week. Weddings, parties, barbecues, rehearsals, graduations, not to mention doing the job of two people now have all made for many moments of biting my tongue, exerting immense self control, and chanting "let it go, let it go, let it go." Until suddenly, I find it's Sunday the last day of just us for awhile, a fact that makes me very sad.

Because, as I already said, I'm selfish.

What makes it difficult, sometimes, is knowing that when he has a choice, he will always choose his family first. Always.  But there are seasons where the honest-to-goodness truth is, he really doesn't have a choice. Which means my choice is to act rationally or turn into some sort of shrewish, shrieking harpy and make everyone miserable.

I don't so much enjoy myself when I get that way, and I know no one else enjoys me that way. The only person to take it up with is God, Himself. We've been there before; it don't end pretty.

So God and I will take another turn at this dying to selfishness. We'll dig a little deeper, and I'll probably drag my feet half the time. I'll miss Hunky's face, his presence, his voice, and his crinkly eye smile. I'll remind myself that all our time is borrowed time to begin with so it isn't as though I have any right to expect it to all be focused on me, me, me, me, and more me.

But I think where the Hunky is concerned I'm always going to be a bit selfish. It's a vice I intend to spend the rest of my life battling.

As for the rest of today, I think I shall wallow in it. Right after Hunky gets up from his nap.

Summer Song

There's something about a summer evening
After the day's somnolent, wet heat
the hair plastered to the back of the neck
the sweat that trickles over the collar bone and between the breasts.

Unlike the chill sharpness of autumn or the dull grey cold of winter,
summer evenings offer invitation.
"Kick off your shoes and stay awhile," it says
knowing it will cast its  long shadows well past time for little ones to be abed.

Fireflies wink while boats hum low over the water
and the silver gleam of twilight teases the eyes with fairy dust promises
until it's impossible to stay inside
where cold canned air blasts out of sensibly geometric holes in the carpet.

Instead I long to enter the soft summer blanket
that damply enfolds the evening environs, promising coolness it will never deliver
Yet the sweet smell of grass cooling and earth releasing the sun's heat
mixed with the song of crickets and evening birds settling in soft rustling chirrups

Sing a song that no other season can compose,
A song that echoes of childhood lost and innocence surrendered
 redemption just beyond the soft magenta horizon
rebirth in the dew fresh springing on the tired sun-baked grass.

Home

Sometimes events happen that take a bit of time to sift through. This week, I voluntarily returned to, and spent time in Ormond Beach.  In the last twenty months, I have only been back one other time,for an overnight trip, and honestly my only thought then was how fast could I leave.

I guess eventually you miss the ocean enough that you are willing to conquer your fears to get to it.

There's so much in this life, in this world, that I'll simply never understand. What happened to us is one of them. The repercussions of it still resound deep and painful down the fractures of my psyche at the most surprising moments.  But as I drove familiar roads and past the old house ( sporting a new front door, which I really hope means that someone is finally living in it. It's a good house.) I found that I can mostly remember now with fondness.  I didn't worry too much about who I might see or what they might say as I shopped for beach chairs in Walmart. (Seriously, I live on a lake, a BIG lake, in Georgia and I can't find beach chairs here. There's another thing I may never understand.). In fact it felt distinctly surreal at times, as though I had never left, so very unchanged were many things.

Maybe the reassuring presence of a good friend who was outside the whole situation and who asked a lot of questions, letting me babble and ramble on whatever thoughts came into my head helped to settle the unanswerables into a small tidy pile with fewer sharp edges.

Maybe the vastness of the ocean helped to put my place in the scheme of things into the proper perspective.

Maybe time and space and love and healing and boundaries and distance and humility and repentance are the recipe for contentment.

I was, in the end, sad to leave, but when I finally drove down that last stretch of road where the hills roll out to the horizon and sun shines dusty sunset motes through the pines, the lake lapping quick-silver against red clay, I was very glad to be finally home.

Exit, Stage Left

 One of the things I have struggled most with recently, is the almost complete severance of connections with people from my Florida past. As I have navigated the waters of forgiveness and letting go, I have questioned God continually whether these relationships were to be ones of reconciliation or if I was hanging on to things that weren't ever meant to last beyond August 2009.

We've wrestled and wrangled. I've wept and He's comforted. I've fretted (after all, what if moving on makes me appear  bitter and hateful if I am not there to defend my actions? Oh pride, will you never cease to find ways of showing yourself?). He's led and I've followed, reluctantly, and been grateful that I wake each day still human and not as a pillar of salt. I have no more sense than Lot's wife most days it seems.

There is no easy way to untangle the threads of life woven over sixteen years time. If I am honest, I admit that the easiest way is a clean, quick amputation, a definitive severing of old and new. What I have called cruel, God would call kind, even generous.  I have spent long hours pondering the life that is still occurring behind a door that is completely closed to me, rather than fully stepping through the one that is open before me.

God is so patient and good. He's waited all this time for me to let go the handle, to stop peeking through the window panes and peering through the curtains, to stop wondering why I had to lay so much down when He was waiting to fill my arms with so much more.

The relationships have been the hardest to release. I so longed to pick friendships up right where they were left off, I simply didn't realize that couldn't happen, because in the interim of two months silence, I was the one who changed, irrevocably and completely, and ultimately for my good and God's glory.  It took time to see it in His light. There are many that I will always miss, but their lives and my life simply do not share the same paths anymore, and likely never will again.  That, too, is God ordained.

What I have worried may be bitterness is really,  very simply, surrender.  I cannot force into wholeness what God intends to remain broken. I can be content with brokenness until He chooses to heal, or if He never chooses so. I'm through masochistically examining and reexamining my own motivations and resting in God's promise to reveal what He would have me examine. He is faithful. In that promise, I can always trust.

It's time for the next act. Exit, stage left.

Lucky

Yesterday, was an amazing day. Rarely does a day that goes by that I don't realize what an incredible gift God is creating in our lives, but some days I feel completely saturated in that blessing.  While children, large and small, floated and swam and laughed and talked and had an absolutely fantastic time, my friend Cheri and I drifted and baked and solved the world's problems, and tried to figure out how to love more like Jesus, and discussed what color eggs chickens lay, and laughed about being lucky.

Here's the surface story: I stay home, everyday, all day and raise my amazing children. It's absolutely the most fabulous component of my life. I live in an obscenely large, beautiful house with a magical deck, where I can often be found reclining in a hammock reading my Kindle. We live on a lake, where I can also often be found swimming, floating or day dreaming. I have a ridiculously handsome and fantastic husband, and I'd wager one of the happiest marriages I know. I'm in the best shape of my life. I wake up every morning excited about what the day holds.

I'm lucky.

Except that all the shiny surface veneer doesn't tell any part of my life story. We spend so much time in our culture looking at what everyone else has, and wishing we could have it too. They must have come by it easily. They must be lucky. Why can't I be lucky too? I won't spend the rest of your time here tooting my own horn, but I will say it took cancer to make an amazing marriage, a catastrophic job loss and bankruptcy to bring us to this house in this town, a year of hard work, pain, early hours, self-denial and training to get into this shape, and a hundred little sacrifices every day to make staying home with my children possible.

We want all the good without any of the work. We want what we see others have because we don't see the sweat and agony that may have gone into the attaining. We want.  And we don't even recognize what we already have.

I'm not lucky.

I am blessed. I do not believe for one second that I have earned or deserve this life that I am so blessed to live. God has poured out His love for us in very visible, tangible ways, but if it all disappears tomorrow (and there's a hundred ways that it absolutely could), we will still be incredibly blessed.

Luck is for gamblers. I'm not gambling. I've placed my hope in the One Sure Thing in this entire universe and any sacrifice I have made to do so doesn't even cast a shadow on the sacrifice He made to offer that gift to me.  May I never spit in face of His blessing by calling the gifts He's given me not good enough or not recognizing His hand which has offered every single thing I have: my life, my body, food to eat, air to breath, a place to lay my head.  Nothing, nothing isn't His to give or withdraw at any time. May I never be lucky.

I came naked from my mother’s womb,

      and I will be naked when I leave.

   The Lord gave me what I had,

      and the Lord has taken it away.

   Praise the name of the Lord!

Job 1:21

I'm No Superman

God never ceases to amuse me. I posted Monday about my current obsession but what I failed to mention is how very hard He has already been pushing me in another area which I can best describe as tangible radicalism. Basically, I'm being very convicted that I need to seek and be open to ways to live my faith, visibly, tangibly, lovingly. This is not a new concept to me, but after reading David Platt's Radical and now (painfully) working my way through Irresistible Revolution, I am excruciatingly aware that I spend more time reading my Bible then out in the world living it. I don't say that flippantly. The funny part is that God also has me focusing on contemplation, meditation, and solitude. It's clear to see that He knows I will go off the deep end of obsession without some serious balance as I travel through this.

I can't save the world. I can't fix all that is broken in it. I'm not Jesus. Heck, I'm not even Superman.

It's hard. Hard to know where to start. Hard to know what to do. Hard NOT to get caught up in the trap of "waiting while I pray for God to bring the perfect opportunity" (is there even such a thing?).  Hard to not be discouraged by the often glacial speed at which change travels.

Then you read something like this:

"But I began to discover "the greater things" (of John 14:12). It was more than just miracles. I began to see that miracles were not so much an expression of Jesus' mighty power as of his mighty love...What had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves, but Jesus' love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually they caught some other disease.  He fed the thousands and the next day they were hungry again. But what we remember is the love. It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper, but that he touched a leper, because no one touches lepers. And the incredible thing about that love is that now it lives inside of us." Shane Claiborne, Irresistible Revolution

Oddly enough, that gives me great hope to make great change. I don't have to make permanent solutions. I do need to get off my arse and get started with something, the nearest need I see and start filling that need with all the love I can muster. Maybe that love will be food, or time, or a touch, or a jacket, or shoes, or a prayer. Its guise doesn't matter. Its duration doesn't matter. Only love matters. I can't change the world. But I can love the world. If we all loved the world with a love like Jesus loves - not with words and judgement, but with action and compassion - we truly could revolutionize life as we know it.

I'll start. Right now.

Obsession Confession

  I tend to be a bit obsessional about things. I am a total information junkie. I love to learn things that catch my interest and will inhale a wide variety of subject matter in a short period of time if something truly catches my fancy.

Over Lent I gave up reading fiction, and to be honest, I haven't been permitted to take it back again. I did get to widen my reading circle a bit to include some non-theology nonfiction. I'm newly infatuated with the Civil War ( I have a bit of a literary crush on Shelby Foote and was very saddened while writing this to learn that he passed several years ago). I am revisiting an obsession with Intelligent Design, including reading Signature in the Cell, Rare Earth and The Privileged Planet. I like to gather and assemble and sort and store and assimilate knowledge.

I say all of this because I am beginning to move away from one obsession, intelligent design, and latch on to a new obsession: discipline, contemplation and monasticism. I mentioned visiting The Holy Spirit Monastery on Thursday, and it has consumed my imaginings since then. Armed with a new interest, a Kindle that needed organizing and some birthday money, I have developed a reading list for summer. I realize it's ambitious and knowing me, subject to change. I am what I am. I've learned to live with it.

The Summer 2011 Reading List


A Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster
Eat this Book: A conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading by Eugene Peterson
Prayer by Phillip Yancey
A Hunger for God: desiring God through fasting and prayer by John Piper
The Deeper Christian Life by Andrew Murray
Lord, Teach us to Pray by Andrew Murray
A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul Miller
Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwitch
Saint Benedict by Pope St. Gregory the Great
Listening to God by Charles Stanley
Hand me Another Brick by Charles Stanley
The Scent of Water: Grace for Every Kind of Broken by Naomi Zacharias and Bernice King
Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton
Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy by Mark Galli

I am also doing more journaling and prayer drawing and am using the following books for meditative purposes:

The Book of Hours by Thomas Merton
Common Prayer: a liturgy for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne
The Furious Longing of God by Brennan Manning
Souvenirs of Solitude by Brennan Manning
The Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen

Prickly

I was talking to some friends the other day about personality types. As it turns out, I am an introvert. I know I've never said that before, either. I actually retook the test this week (having taken it years ago). The only thing that really changed is that I am even farther, if possible, towards introvert on the scale. In fact, most days, I feel a  lot like this:

I haven't really had a problem being this creation. You can't tell from the picture but they are almost four feet tall. They are big. They are quite beautiful in their own way. They are intimidating. And nothing, I mean nothing, gets too close. Certainly not close enough to hurt them.

But the thing is that God has been working on me since returning from Arizona. He's pointing out the prickles and the callouses and the defenses and the walls, and He's telling me that they have no place in my life.

It's more difficult than I care to admit and more frightening than I allow myself to consider too long.

At least He's being gentle about it now. Better to do a remodel with a gentle Abba than face the discipline after I disobey.

Still

Am I not always posting about stillness? It seems I am, but I never fully put anything I say, or think, or read about into practice when it comes to contemplation.

I have decided to start journaling prayers. I'm no good at internal conversations...too distracted, too restless, too prone to wander off to the next sparkling thing that catches my eye. Putting pen to paper forces me to sit, to think, to stop, to still, to quiet.

I procrastinated again today - distracted by hammock and new books and thunder showers, but finally I sat down still and began writing a prayer...more of a confession, if you will. It was neither eloquent nor very religious, but it was real. It was honest me, nakedly aware of who I am when I truly enter the Holy of Holies.

In the midst of my prayer I was "distracted" and entirely entranced when this flew into view

I was utterly captivated. Spellbound. Barely the length of my index finger he flew about and then he did something I have never before seen a hummingbird do. He landed. Right. on the branch. in. front. of. me. I was captivated. I couldn't look away, I couldn't breath. I wanted him to sit there all day so that I could just admire his absolutely amazing minuscule beauty.

But of course he did fly away.

And then God told me something. I am the hummingbird, and He made me. He is absolutely transfixed with the adoration of me. He sits and waits and has waited as eternity unfolds while I travel about, constantly busy, flapping my wings at speeds beyond sight, barely glimpsing me as I fly by. Usually I'm so fast that if he wasn't omniscient He wouldn't even know where I was. 

What He wants me to do is land. Rest. Stop. Not because I have anything to give or offer or do for Him. But because He thinks I am the most exquisite creature in all the universe. 

I am His

and wonder of wonders, He is mine.

I can't wait to be still again tomorrow.

Monastic

The beautiful arching columns here are hand mixed and hand poured concrete. The blue light comes through hand made stained glass jalousie windows. The pews and kneelers are hand hewn and smoothed. It is a  beautifully cool and sacred place built entirely in silence. Amazing.

About an hour up the road from here is an actual monastery. Until we moved here, I wasn't aware that monasteries were still extant, but the idea of a life closed in study and contemplation fascinates me.  We went to visit this week. I was left feeling even more drawn to meditation and contemplation than ever before. Obviously the monastic life isn't mine to lead, and I wouldn't for one second trade the life I do have for another, but as I watched the monks walk with slow deliberation, speak to each other with rapt attention ad great passion, close their eyes in adoring devotion, gaze upon the Word with reverent awe, I wanted more of what they have.
We live in a noisy world of constant audio and visual stimulation.  I wonder how much we miss simply because we are so fast, so intent on the next thing, so focused five steps down the road, that we aren't even for one second aware of the weight of the moment we are in.
I am no monk, but I can learn from their ideals: simplicity, community, work, devotion, prayer.  They are bedrocks worthy of foundation.

In Which I Start Very Small

I like to start big. Perhaps you've noticed.
I'm an all in
passionate embrace
loud laugh
fiercely devoted
race to the finish line
kind of a girl.

But lately I'm feeling slower, and stiller, and quieter
(which isn't like me at all, really)

I often feel like if I don't write profound things with deep spiritual impact then it really isn't worth writing at all.
Except
that a million little moments of breath taking joy are what fill my day.
They aren't often profound, or earth shattering (I'm finding that very little actual is, unless the earth actually shakes and shatters).
So why not share and enjoy?

No promises, no guarantees. Just small things, little moments that make up a full, quiet life.